Handel

Our Lady of Handel (Onze Lieve Vrouw van Handel)

In her Chapel of our Lady of Handel (Kapel van O.L. Vrouw van Handel), O.L. Vrouwestraat 63, 5423 SJ Handel, 2nd half 14th century, 35 cm, linden wood.

Although there are no original Black Madonnas in the Netherlands that meet all my criteria for being called that, there are several, who share the common themes or “leitmotif” of the Dark Mother: sacred trees, water, miraculous origins, healings, and Heaven using animals to communicate its will. Therefore I am including the following information Eline Kinsbergen sent me on Mother Mary veneration in the Netherlands.

Reverence for the Mother is still present in the Netherlands, especially in the Southern part, where most people used to follow the Roman Catholic faith. This part of the country has many shrines dedicated to Her, but sometimes they are a little hard to find. Some are Lourdes-shrines, but many are not.

In some parts, old places of worship seem to survive more or less pristine, like in Handel, the oldest pilgrimage site for Mary in the province of North Brabant, where we find the complete package: a late Medieval statue ‘found in a hawthorn tree’ sometime in the thirteenth century, a well (visible but nowadays inaccessible to the public),  and several legends surrounding the origin of the statue and its miraculous healings.i]

A folk story tells of a Demoness or Mother-of-the-Devil (‘Duvelsmoer’ in Dutch) walking and breathing fire all through the empty lands. She forgot to breathe on this one hawthorn tree, and years later, in the 13th century, a peasant passing by thought to cut himself a flowering twig to put on his jacket. The Miracle statue grew right out of the twig.

 There are two chapels to the Holy Mother of Handel, one at the hawthorn tree, where she appeared, and one 700 meters further North. That's because the team of oxen carrying the building materials for the chapel refused to stop at the tree. No matter how hard their drivers tried to beat them into submission, they insisted on continuing 700 meters more. Since this is a common theme in Black Madonna legends, it was recognized as behavior guided by the divine Mother.

Another typical Black Madonna element is the sacred, healing water. Lack of water hindered the progress of construction. Miraculously, Mary caused a little brook to well up, whose water is considered medicinal. The ‘Holy Well’ is in the park behind the chapel, surrounded by a fountain house. Its abundant waters merge into a bigger stream nearby. Many of the original documents are lost, but thousands of pilgrims used to come here and the Madonna caused many miraculous healings.  

To this day, there are several annual processions to Handel with many participants, but the month of May (‘Mary’s month’) is when most visitors come. Famous is the annual procession from Valkenswaard to Handel.

In the seventeenth century, at the end of the Eighty Years War, this area was reconquered from the Spaniards and a lot of their Roman Catholic places of worship were damaged or destroyed.  However the Mother of Handel statue was kept hidden during this difficult period, was triumphantly brought back, and reinstated in 1662.

Footnotes:
[i] Here is an interesting, related article on tree shrines in the Netherlands and other places. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomheiligdom

Sources:
* Amsterdam Center for European Ethnology’s article on “Pilgrimage to Handel”
* Brotherhood of Our Lady of Handel processions